Making it in the Village … Rachel Brosnahan in The Marvelous Mrs Maisel.
Photograph: Nicole Rivelli/AP

Good comedies have at least one minor character you’re always pleased to see. “Hurrah!” you say out loud, as they brighten whichever scene they’ve breezed into. Then they depart, and all that’s left to do is wait until they appear again.

Former Gilmore Girls showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino’s ribbon-wrapped gift to the world continues, in its second season, to be a fizz, a snap, a fillip, a dance, a total escape. We rejoin Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) – the just-so Upper West Side housewife who, having found out about her husband shtupping his secretary, has stopped facilitating his failing standup comedy career and started one of her own – as she navigates life as both a divorcee and a semi-professional comic.

The triumphant last shot of the debut season told us that Midge has what it takes to make it. Here is the closest thing this series has to a worry: we don’t really want her to. We don’t want anything to change. We want her to continue playing gigs in Greenwich Village dive bars, sticking out like an elegantly gloved thumb in her divine frocks and shoes that match her handbag, while New York in 1959 zings around her, all pristine shop fronts and gleaming chequered cabs.

But Sherman-Palladino and her husband/collaborator Daniel Palladino (given the show’s theme of men always being half a step behind, it’s apt that the episodes credited to him aren’t quite as strong) know how to prolong a fantasy. The new run paddles happily round in slowly expanding circles via sojourns to Paris and the Catskills, each of which is a crisp retro paradise. That allows more time to get to know those supporting players of whom we never tire: Alex Borstein scores a laugh a line as Midge’s coarse, scrappy manager, Susie, whose mixture of disdain and awe at her client’s social status hides fierce admiration and perhaps a dash of longing. “Look at you,” she says during one of their lunchtime sparring sessions. “It’s like a dollop of whipped cream grew a head.”

The Marvelous Mrs Maisel brims with dialogue where every syllable is dead on the comic beat, and scenes choreographed like Broadway musicals: a swarm of uniformed porters unpacking vacation cases from a car, for instance, or the girls on a department-store switchboard rattling through a thousand calls a minute. It’s a rich source of Jewish-Manhattan wisecracking neurosis, too, particularly in the hands of Tony Shalhoub as Midge’s fussy-professor father, Abe, who this year gains a vibrant inner life to go with his bottomless repository of hilarious exclamations (“Now I’m second-guessing these slacks!”).

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As for Midge herself, her tendency to get up on stage and improvise comic routines commenting on recent plot developments is both the show’s biggest thrill and its steepest suspension of disbelief. Brosnahan, who has an Emmy and a Golden Globe already for Maisel and should get more, is miraculously skilled at banging out these pitch-perfect monologues. It’s wise to put a cap on the club scenes, though, especially when Brosnahan interacts with Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce, Midge’s mentor and platonic love, because together they’re just too charming.

Yet along with the deliberately gradual plot progression, they’re about the only pleasure that’s rationed here. In an early episode we briefly see that it’s Christmas/Hanukkah, yet in Maisel-land, every day is a red velvet holiday. Returning to the wretched real world is a sad obligation. All that’s left to do is wait for Mrs Maisel to breeze back to us next year.